Legal and liability issues for publishing an online news site
A few weeks ago, a ProsePoint Express user emailed us asking about liability and other legal issues to consider when running an online news site. This caught us somewhat unprepared. After all, we're not lawyers, nor do we want to spend our time (and our users time) speculating about something we're not experts in. We'd always planned to concentrate on our strengths - technology - so our users can concentrate on theirs.
Still, the topic had been raised, and it was a valid support question, so we wanted to help in however way we could. After some Google searching, we found some useful introductory guides.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has a very good and comprehensive section on legal and liability issues. It's nominally aimed at bloggers, but should apply equally to online publishers in general. However, it is United States centric, so we dug up a couple of similar resources from other countries as well.
Legal Liability Overview
https://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers/legal/liability/overview
Legal Guide for Bloggers
https://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers/legal
How to avoid libel and defamation
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/collective/A1183394
Self Regulation of the Press Industry
http://www.inbrief.co.uk/media-law/press-self-regulation.htm
Defamation and Internet Service Providers
http://www.inbrief.co.uk/media-law/defamation-and-internet-service-provi...
Legal issues for bloggers
http://www.artslaw.com.au/info-sheets/info-sheet/legal-issues-for-bloggers/
Hopefully these links will be useful to you as well.